YIKES and YORKES my dööds! 18+ blog for possible nsfw content. Requests Open. Requests can take a minute bc I am certifiable. All will be filled, though. don't follow for consistency I hyper-fixate.
When Eddie comes back he looks more solemn, somehow, gripping something in the pocket of his jacket and a shower cap in the other hand that Richie immediately recognizes as Stan’s like a kick to the chest. Time suspends for Richie in this moment, his brain gearing down from too many places at once to focus down on one point: Stan. Richie wishes more than anything that he had told Stan about everything when they were kids. He almost had many times and looking back he isn’t so sure Stan didn’t have some sort of general idea anyway. It isn’t like he ever thought Stan would necessarily stop being his friend. Richie never thought that Stan would react with anything strictly bad but Richie also worries that his plants have feelings and hate him, so, maybe his frame-of-reference is off.
He knew how Stan had felt. Alone, weird, gangly and a loser. But they all were and that’s what made it all ok. It’s the reason that he’d told Bev anything at all. She’d been the girl of the group; someone to help him through those awful weeks once a month. Bev had helped him flatten his chest and spent hours late into the night after the rest of the Losers had gone to bed to help him practice his voice. There is a lot of guilt for Richie to process when it comes to Stan. Richie’d had that false, child-like view of a world that would give him time with the people he loved. He had thought that he’d have time to really find himself and become who he was meant to be before he opened up to the group.
But then they’d all drifted apart. Slowly, over years of school and moving out of town and a giant cosmic clown, they’d forgotten one another until all was left was insecurity, fear, and emptiness. And that’s where Stan had been. Alone. Scared. Trapped. Richie knows a thing or two about being trapped.
Almost as if to punctuate this Eddie opens the car and slides inside.
They’re both still. Richie’s hands are gripping his phone so tight that he can feel it creak and Eddie doesn’t look like he’s even breathing. All Richie can think is that he’s spent so much of his life running away from anything vaguely emotionally charged that being in this car, at this place, with the love of his life sitting within arms reach is just really lighting every nerve on fire. Nausea rolls in his gut suddenly, sitting heavy like his heart is there being eaten away by acid and swimming in bile, and he feels like he’s seconds away from just phasing through his own body.
Eddie breaks the silence first, voice soft and raw, “Stan was right.” Richie has absolutely no context for this and his mind sparks with anxiety at what Eddie could mean. “That first summer, when Ben built this place, and we went down inside the first time,” Eddie takes in a deep breath and then laughs wetly, turning the shower cap over in his hand, “I said something to Stan about how dirt can hold diseases and, you know, Mom had read some article about permafrost and how they’d found old plague diseases in the ice and she just took that and ran with it, you remember how she was.
“Anyway, Stan just stands there at the ladder, everyone else has already gone down and I can hear you and Bev bellow fighting over the last cigarette, and he gets that Very Serious Stan look. Like, he always looked serious and together but he had that one look and if you got it,” Eddie shakes his head and smiles softly, “it was like you couldn’t look away. I got stuck there, frozen, staring him in the eyes and just waiting, like, weirdly calm and ready to receive whatever piece of wisdom or advice he had.
“He said that if I wasn’t careful, I would be sick and small for as long as she wanted, because I was easier to contain that way. He said that out of all of us he was worried the most about himself and me never being able to leave Derry. Like the rest of you had just enough escape velocity to leave orbit and the two of us were destined to crash back down.” Eddie sniffles and wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. Richie is sitting, still frozen, and riveted on Eddie’s every word. He is barely breathing, doesn’t want to make any noise to interrupt, the only flash of movement are his eyes as they dart over Eddie’s face. “And that scared me.”
Eddie looks to Richie then, tears in his eyes and a self-loathing set to his mouth; it’s so visceral that Richie makes an abortive move towards Eddie with an outstretched hand and freezes again, stuck, “Then he just went down to the rest of you and I remember standing there, terrified, because I had literally not once considered or imagined a future that didn’t have you in it, Richie.”
That strikes Richie across his proverbial face like a harsh elbow to the nose in a crowded bar. He just blinks across the gearshift to Eddie, who looks both larger-than-life and just as small as Richie remembered him, and swallows around a dry tongue. The first coherent thing that passes across the haze of Richie’s brain is that exact sentiment. He remembered being overwhelmingly, disgustingly in love with Eddie and incapable of imagining a life that didn’t include spending every day with him. Like it was expected. How it was. Inevitable.
“And then, Mom, she,” Eddie turns from Richie again and grinds the heels of his hands into his eyes, barking out a harsh laugh, “she just like fuckin’ zeroed-in on that, ya know? Like she could smell the insecurity on me. Just,” he makes a stabbing motion at the dashboard with a stiff finger and works his jaw for a second, breathing harshly out his nose to try and calm down the desire to sob, “needled me for months. Always about you. Only you. And suddenly, like she willed it into existence, I started to believe her. That you were pulling away from me, that you’d leave, and then I’d understand that she was the only one I could trust.
“I bought it!” Eddie laughs and runs a hand though his hair, shaky, and it’s then that Richie notices that the cool, golden wedding band was missing and didn’t even leave behind a tan-line. Eddie turns back to Richie again and the disgust that Richie sees on Eddie’s face floors him. He imagined that look being directed at him, not in Eddie’s on contempt of self. “Even with her dead, I still bought it, and then married the two-point-o version of her. Stan was right.” Eddie nods, almost to himself, “I may have left, physically, but I ran right into what I already knew. And made myself miserable doing it.”
Richie feels like he’s going to explode, “What are you trying to say?”
Eddie laughs, a little hysterical, and twists to hold Richie’s complete attention with wide, warm brown eyes, “I saw your face, in the restaurant, when you saw my wedding band. I remember what it felt like when you finally looked at me, looked over all of me, and I felt that,” Eddie gestures towards his gut with his hand almost absently, “I felt that settle in me and it felt good and then you saw the ring and the look on your face made me want to set myself on fire for putting it there.”
“What?” Richie tries to joke, desperation bleeding through more than humor, and breaks eye contact with Eddie to laugh once. “You’re married, so what? So is Bev. So is Bill. People get married.”
Eddie shakes his head violently and and makes a sharp cutting motion with his hand, “I’m trying to tell you that I married the wrong person!”
“Eddie.” Richie says his name and it comes out like a plead, begging, and Richie feels the little ground he had under him disappearing fast when they lock eyes again. He swallows, “You...it’s been a really awful last like forty-eight hours and you’re stressed-”
The man next to him actually growls in frustration, “Stop.”
“-and!” Richie half-yells, “you just remembered that we’re best friends. It’s fresh. Don’t,” Richie’s voice breaks and he clears his throat, “don’t say things you don’t mean.”
Eddie looks positively broken and he chokes out a sob, “Fuck you, Richie. I may have forgotten who you were, your face, your voice, but you don’t know what it felt like to miss you anyway! There was a hole in me,” Eddie makes that gesture towards his gut again, “and it ate at me every time I had a moment to myself. It digested me for decades. I didn’t marry for love, you absolute bastard, I did it because that’s what I thought I had to do!
“And then I saw you in the restaurant, and God, it was like color in my life again. I knew you. I saw you the moment you walked in and I felt my breath catch in my chest and I realized why, for every day since I lost you, that I felt empty and adrift.” Eddie takes a deep breath and exhales, mouth curving into a smile filled with ease and fondness and peace. Richie feels heady at that smile. Eddie continues, voice soft and sweet, “When Mike called me and told me about It, Rich, the first thing my brain remembered was you.”
In that moment, Richie’s phone rings.
Eddie twitches at the sound, “Is that the Jurassic Park 3 phone ring?”
Richie is still frozen, their eyes still locked, and the phone is still ringing when Richie tries, “When we were kids?”
“Are you going to answer your phone?”
“When we were kids? You felt…?”
“It could be Mike.”
Richie frowns to himself, breaking eye contact to answer his phone, holding it up to his ear and turns his back on Richie to look out the driver’s side window, “Yeah?”
“You ok? It’s been a minute.” Mike’s tinny voice asks over a crackling line. The reception out here is shit.
Richie nods and holds the phone between his shoulder and ear for a moment to turn the car’s engine over and turn around on the old, dust and gravel road, “Yeah, we’re ok. I still need mine but then we’ll be back.”
“Be safe.” A pause, and then, tentative, “Are you...ok?”
Richie resists the urge to glance at Eddie and nods to himself, “Never better. I gotta go, Mike. Gotta have my hands on ten and two.”
“I’m not a ten?”
Richie bursts out a surprised laugh, “Mike, darling, you are the golden standard of tens.”
“Flatterer.” Mike laughs and the easy sound relaxes Richie’s tense shoulders and aching neck. “He’s trying.”
So, fuck Mike for knowing what’s happening like some sort of shitty, nickel psychic. It’s frustratingly endearing that Mike knows them so well. Richie sighs, “Not now.”
“If you keep running, one day you’ll have nowhere new to go.”
Richie swallows and hums, “Solid fortune cookie impression.”
“I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em.”
“Fuck you.”
“Love you, too. Keep me updated.”
The call ends as he pulls to a stop at a four-way intersection in the center of the forest and an old gas station/mechanic’s shop with the steel skeletons of half a dozen cars sitting in an over-grown parking lot. There isn’t anyone behind him, hasn’t been a single car that’s passed them since they made their way out here, and it’s quiet in the way that a small hometown is. There’s the wind through the bare trees and the dying leaves at their roots. There are a few birds here and there but the sound is much more the echo of empty space. The hollow ring between the bark of trees plays back the rumble of the car as it idles.
Richie’s hands are tight and hard against the wheel and he’s trying really hard to fight the urge to disappear, “When you said you married the wrong person...did you mean that you wished you’d never married at all?”
“Before I remembered you, yeah, I wished I’d never married at all.” Eddie replies, soft.
The taller man gulps, “And when you remembered me?”
Eddie sighs like he’s put upon but his smile belays it, “Before, when we were kids, and I found out for the first time that marrying someone meant being with them for the rest of your life...I thought of you.”
Richie gets a little hung up on how Eddie says, ‘Before’.
“I’m not a woman.” Richie grouses out through clenched teeth and pulls away from the stop sign, accelerating through dusty back roads; his totem was at home and he was hoping that the spare key was still under Mom’s garden gnome.
This is a problem that Richie knew he would have to deal with sooner or later. Though, it hadn’t really occurred to him that this would come on the heels of what seems to be some sort of half-baked confession of sorts by Eddie. Richie feels like he’s being torn in multiple directions at once. He has to remind himself that Eddie had married a woman. That his confession is predicated on who they had been as kids, not as he was now. Richie had wanted Eddie when they were younger - that’s fact - but, something he had never wanted was for Eddie to see him the way you see someone you love in the little moments: early morning showers, brushing teeth, changing clothes, sleeping curled in on one-another.
Richie hadn’t even wanted to see himself naked, let alone let someone else.
“I didn’t...I know that, Richie.”
The wind outside the car whips and thrashes against the side, sounding like great sighing gusts and groans. Sky darkens into something murky and thick, flashing with bursts of light and chased by rolling thunder. The rain starts up slow and soft, small droplets almost mist-like, and patters against the rental car’s windshield. The world is just as gray as Richie feels and he’s teetering on the line between being bone-achingly distraught and irrationally, directionless angry. He’s leaning towards angry. He’s been alone and sad long enough. Maybe he deserves to be angry now. Who is Eddie, anyway? Richie loves him - this is unfortunate.
But Richie has always been the king of denial so it’s nothing to push down and repress these feelings all over again.
Richie tries to not sound bitter, “You may have married the wrong person but the one you wanted never existed.”
“You’re saying you aren’t anything like you were when we were kids?” Eddie scoffs.
Richie’s eyes cut to the side to glare at Eddie so quickly they flash, “Take a good, long look, Eddie. Spot the differences.”
“God, you are so fucking dense!” Eddie yells, punctuating each word with a punch to his own knee. “I married the wrong person because I’m fucking gay!”
The car suddenly drops several miles-per-hour as Richie’s brain shuts down, subsequently relaxing his lead-foot. The rain is coming down hard now. Striking against the car in great torrents, sounding so similar to hail. The downpour haze makes the cab seem more intimate, like it’s suspended in time and space. Eddie’s breathing is coming out in angry huffs through his nose, pointedly looking out the windshield while he shakes in the wake of his own confession.
Richie tries not to crash them and gains control of himself and the car, “Um, I...how...when did you figure this out?”
His voice sounds cavalier to his ears and for that he’s thankful because he feels like he’s being flayed alive, emotionally speaking, and he’s not sure what emotion to settle on. So, Eddie’s gay. That’s...that is definitely something. Hope fills his chest again like it had back in the restaurant when he’d first seen Eddie again. And he hates himself for it. There’s no discernible reason why that automatically means he has a chance with Eddie. Richie’s heard what people have to say about being trans and being a real gay man.
“Do you mean my ‘aha’ moment? When it made sense?” Eddie asks.
“Is that not how it worked for you?”
Eddie pauses for a beat, then, “Not exactly.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means,” Eddie sighs, “that I knew something was different but I didn’t know what.”
Richie casts a look towards Eddie for a moment, speculative, and then focuses back to the road as they reach Derry city limits. He can tell that Eddie is uncomfortable and bearing his soul so Richie cuts him some slack, “That’s ok. It took me a long time to realize I was gay.”
“You’re gay?” Eddie asks and Richie tries not to read into the tone too much because it sounds awfully hopeful.
Richie laughs, “My joke at the restaurant did say that I like it up the ass.”
“Girls can peg.”
That throws Richie so hard he is worried for a moment that he’ll kill them both in this deathtrap of a car. His brain is having trouble processing that sentence as one that actually came out of Eddie’s mouth.
“Well, shit, you’re right.” They pull up the Tozier’s driveway and Richie throws the car into park. “Girl power!”
Eddie laughs and doesn’t move to leave the car, “Your token is here?”
Richie looks up into the darkened house of his childhood. His mother is likely at work and he feels a flash of guilt for not even telling her he was in town. Not the time, is what he’d decided. Maybe if he survives this.
“It’s in my room. Are you ready for some nostalgia?”
Eddie gives him a look Richie can’t place, “You want me to come inside?”
“Rich joke area aside: yes. Don’t you want a blast from the past?”
Eddie’s blush at the innuendo sparks something in Richie that he hasn’t felt in a long time outside of occasional interest in Terry Crews every time he’s seen him in an Old Spice commercial. While that had been more in the realm of appreciation for a body and sense of humor for someone unattainable, Eddie was here, real, and the love of his life. He felt flush with want and desire and the overwhelming need to bring that rich blush to the apples of Eddie’s cheeks again, stronger, and see it brush across his nose and his ears to bring out the freckles Richie counted himself.
The shorter man hasn’t taken a breath and Richie tries, and fails, to not notice Eddie’s dilated eyes when he says, “As long as I’m with you.”
“Eds.” Richie whispers, reverent, and yearning so hard he can’t imagine loving anything more.
Eddie looks down, slowly, tracking down Richie’s body, and his lazer-gaze focuses on Richie’s hands. He licks his lips and tries in vain to not let the molten-hot rush of ‘I pleased’ and ‘please him again’ on a repeat like a locked grove. Richie reaches out finally, convinced that this is it, and doesn’t want to pass away without feeling the warmth of a blush he invoked against the soft, tan cheek of the only person Richie had ever loved; and likely, ever will. And, God, his skin is just as smooth and weathered as Richie had ever envisioned. Eddie’s silken cheek feels like the comfortable, worn slide of a well-loved shirt.
“Rich.” Eddie breathes and it ghosts across Richie’s nose like a kiss. “Do you understand?”
And Eddie just looks so wrecked. His eyes are bright and brimming with tears of pure want and fervor. His arm snakes forward like a shot to wrap around Richie’s wrist, holding him steady to Eddie’s cheek, and nuzzles into his palm like it is the only thing in this world that provides him comfort and love. The moment Eddie’s lips press to Richie’s palm, ever-so delicately and softer than a sigh, Richie feels like his whole body has been ignited. Eddie’s lips pressed across his faint and fluttering pulse. The feeling of soft and weathered lips, that he’d imagined time and time again, fluttering ever-so-slightly with nerves and bubbling emotion sends shocks to Richie’s heart with each twitch of Eddie’s lips.
Richie catches Eddie’s eyes and feels his fingertips curve in an almost to-tight grip around the line of Eddie’s jaw; he doesn’t disguise the firm demand of his voice, “Say it.”
Eddie’s body quakes forward, following Richie’s hand like a heat-sink, and flutters his eyes closed against the command. His chin tips up and he leans into Richie’s space like he’s the only thing keeping him tethered, “Do you remember that night in September in eighth-grade?”
“What?” Richie replies, so focused on Eddie’s heavy eyes and the full set of his lips.
The shorter man laughs, breath huffing out across Richie’s palm like a brand, “You had just gotten out of band practice. Lugging that giant trombone around. You came to my house that evening, remember? Carried that thing on your back like it was no problem, smirking to me through my window, joking about being strong enough to pin me to the wall and that…” Eddie sucks in a breath, eyes opening slowly like he doesn’t want to wake up, “just flushed me with this pulse of want. Like that would be right. As it should be. That my place was hiked up against the wall with you in-between my legs and my arms around your neck.”
“Fuck.” Richie whines, thumb slipping from its firm stroke across his cheekbone to skate over Eddie’s plump lip.
“Can I?” Eddie asks, almost to himself, and the small, wet tip of his tongue peeks out to ghost over the rough pad of Richie’s thumb. The smaller man shivers at the taste and hums, “I dreamed about that, you know? I felt so guilty, like I would corrupt you, and all I wanted was to touch constantly. I goaded you just to get you to touch me. I lived for that. I went to sleep and woke up wanting that.
“And when you’d sneak in and sleep over?” Eddie tsks, pressing another impossibly light kiss into Richie’s palm, “I went to sleep hoping that when I woke up that you’d be holding me like you did every morning.”
Richie sucks in a breath, “That’s why.”
“What?” Eddie asks, an impossibly adorable crease to his brow.
“Every time I came to you in the middle of the night it was because it was the perfect excuse.”
Eddie blinks up at him and looks dazed, “What?”
“I was so afraid of you touching me,” Richie gulps, “but I couldn’t stop touching you. It was like that’s all my hands were supposed to do.”
“What is it?”
Richie blinks, eyes focused on his thumb as it dips into the corner of Eddie’s mouth. He watches, enraptured, as Eddie suckles at it lightly, “My hands?”
“Your token.” Eddie says after letting Richie’s thumb go with a pop. He sounds nervous, swallowing, and his hand strays back to his jacket pocket. “I want to see your token.”
Richie feels nervous again. His mind is hazy with the feeling of Eddie’s tongue swirling around his thumb. Drunk on these half-confessions and sexual tension. Being vulnerable with Eddie like this, with a hand secured to Eddie’s face and the burning implication of a kiss, is one thing. Something he struggles with on a daily basis is fear of closeness and physically bearing yourself to someone. But the token takes that a step further. It says something that Richie had only barely been able to admit to Bev one night soaking a load of underwear in Richie’s basement with a pack of cigarettes and an old, dusty handle of vodka between them. Unsweetened, room-temperature tea is not a suitable chaser.
“Do you think he knows?” Richie asks, nervous, the tremor of his hands shaking the dim light of the cherry of his cigarette.
Bev pours out two more shots and gives Richie a sympathetic look that is simultaneously fondly annoyed, “No-one really knows. I only do because you said something. Don’t give me that look. Yeah, we can all see something there. Anyone would have to, babe. But that doesn’t mean anything. What’s between you two is yours and if that...you know, evolves, it would make sense but it isn’t a given.”
“But-”
“It isn’t a given for others.” Bev amends, “Look, in your head, these are absolutes. These are facts. You know that he’s it for you. But you don’t broadcast your thoughts into people’s heads. No-one can read minds. Things like this, feelings, become real when you say them out-loud. Anything else is speculation. If he did ever find out, babe, he’d still need to hear it from you to truly know. And someday, when you say it, you’re going to be so pissed you let yourself be so worried about it.”
sign post the day I officially died bc of fucking James Ransone and his quote about "we're a shared fucking organism" and liking Zizek and looking within ourselves to confront whats bothering us . .. just K.O.ed me bc its one thing to have a celebrity crush on someome for talent and base attractiveness but its another level to appreciate them intellectually
Basically this is my Whole Ass Mood on feeling anything about him
i understand people saying that mike would help bill write better endings but i know in my heart of hearts that mike “pepe silvia” “let’s solve this problem with a drug vision” hanlon would enable the absolute WEIRDEST shit that william denbrough has ever written in his life
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